battleMETAL - Why Quake / Darkplaces - Part 1 - The Devil you thought you knew well enough

The Devil you thought you knew well enough

Now we begin to get a bit more technical about why picking Darkplaces was a good idea. First let us begin with the software concept called a source port. This example, Darkplaces is a source port of Quake 1. Source ports allow software to be run on systems that are different than the original specs. In video games, most source ports merely allow the specific game to played on a newer system - like Quake 1 (circa 1996) to be played natively on Windows 10. However, Darkplaces is also a library of modifications to the Quake 1 software that expands functionality.

Darkplaces was developed by a user by the handle LordHavoc and you can find more about that over here. The biggest things that Darkplaces accomplished was a modernization of sorts for the Quake engine. Updates to the rendering software allows Darkplaces to draw higher resolution textures, real time lighting, higer polygon-count models, smoother animations. Not just rendering, Darkplaces also allows for higher quality sound effects and music. Finally, a big update was raising the memory capacity of the engine to handle large quantities of monsters, bullets, players, and other game objects in a level and even increasing the size of potential levels. In essence, the Quake 1 engine is a Virtual Machine geared towards running Quake, so upping memory capacity is a huge plus if one is looking to expand the Quake engine to be more than running Quake.

All of these features fit well enough into my understanding of modding Quake 1 and Quake 2 engines. The requirements of the engine, relative to more modern engines, is incredibly modest, and the engine runs well on almost anything. Actually modifying the engine is generally accomplished by changing the game code. Game code is in a ‘bastardized’ version of the C coding language. A lot of functionality has been stripped out or pared back to concerns only of the game engine. Plenty of tutorials and tutorial sites are at one’s fingertips as well, making question-answering fairly quick and easy. This is a benefit to an older game engine, a lot of the most basic questions have been answered somewhere and a lot of other people have tried something similar to what you are trying to do.

By choosing a Quake derivative like Darkplaces , I was also subscribing to Quake’s template of game creation. Most game engines define how to add levels, link levels together, manage player inventory, etc. Even if a game allows a ton of modding, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to rip out a game’s functionality completely and try to bash in something that doesn’t conceptually jive with the game. I knew battleMETAL would be an FPS, a mech FPS, but it still was an FPS, thus Quake aligned conceptually with that goal. I also knew that battleMETAL levels don’t need to be super complex or scripted, and again Quake aligns with this concept. So, I talked myself into downloading Darkplaces and took a look under the hood.